How reliable should FTTP be?

How reliable should an FTTP connection be? I see odd comments on here like "it's been rock solid", but I've had Swish Fibre for just over a year now, and I'm just getting over my third significant outage.

The first was a few months in: pretty much the whole Swish network went down at about 2am one morning. It came back on about 8.30am, but that was 6 hours downtime.

Then a couple of months ago my ONT (Swish use Adtran boxes) failed, and it took a day for Swish to come out and replace it, after I'd done the yes I have power cycled it, yes I have rebooted the router dance with support.

This morning about 1am the whole Swish network (it seems) went down again, and didn't come back on here until about 10:20am, so down for 9 hours this time. Swish's phones don't come on till 9am, and then their switchboard promptly jammed. For the whole duration of today's incident their support website showed working normally.

Is it just that Swish are rubbish, or don't have sufficient redundancy in their network, or am I being unreasonable? I went to fibre mostly because I wanted reliability, not speed, and I am somewhat disappointed so far. Losing 39 hours in a year is about 99.5% availability; not bad, I suppose, but I thought 99.9..% was achievable. At least it doesn't go down every time it rains, like my old copper line did.

Perhaps a touch subjective, but the reliability of a fibre network is less down to the technology and more down to the operational maturity and capability of the operators.

Some of the turkeys in the AltNet (and I hasten to add the EAD / DIA / leased line space) I space I wouldn't let run my kids kindergarten network 😅 Others are brilliant.

All in all the Openreach network probably sets a fairly good example of reliability for FTTP. When I was with them it was pretty much faultless for 2 years with Cerberus and even good old TallTalk the cheapskates with appalling customer service had a pretty reliable run.

YMMV. 😎

When OR FTTP was first installed in our village there where two outages within a few months, it appears this was due to faults in the build. Since then it has been working fine, and that includes our TalkTalk business connection. I do wonder if in years to come when it has become old and decrepit it will become just as problematical as copper.

I have had fibre from Zzoomm, since the middle of July and to be honest seemed to have had more problems than did with in the 9 years I was on FTTC with Plusnet. Saying that things have improved over the last couple of weeks. In theory Fibre should be more reliable, but it still relies on equipment at either end.

We will see how it goes until the end of my contract next year.

Openreach has its problems as well, I chat to someone in Coventry using Vodafone via Openreach, the problems they are having is incredible, once they come to the end of the contract they are getting off Openreach.

In reply to a post by burble:

When OR FTTP was first installed in our village there where two outages within a few months, it appears this was due to faults in the build. Since then it has been working fine, and that includes our TalkTalk business connection. I do wonder if in years to come when it has become old and decrepit it will become just as problematical as copper.

I'm similarly curious about what faults and issues may arise over time with FTTP - specifically thinking about the 'local' network rather than the backhaul.

I'd imagine Openreach will keep things working and maintained (more or less), but one can't help but wonder how gracefully some of the altnets will age.

Re copper being problematic - certainly for broadband yes, but I think in its mature final years, the PSTN ended up broadly being pretty good for voice. Hopefully, given that FTTP is built for data from the outset, it should be and hopefully remain pretty reliable.

My router was reporting something like 3 months up time before the last power cut (BT).

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Openreach has its problems as well, I chat to someone in Coventry using Vodafone via Openreach, the problems they are having is incredible, once they come to the end of the contract they are getting off Openreach.

Individual experiences here are pretty meaningless, unless you can get a statistically significant sample.

Overall, the "last mile" fault rates for FTTP are much lower than copper/FTTC, at least for Openreach. There's just very little to go wrong: splices are permanent, water can't get in, there are no active cabinets. Storms can still bring down overhead lines of course.

Problems with the ISP's network are something else. These are likely to be the same for both FTTC and FTTP customers of that ISP.

In the case of an Altnet (except for wholesale providers like Cityfibre), they are providing both the last-mile connectivity *and* the transit network. The reliability you get will be determined both by how well they lay fibre and how well they can run an IP transit network. As Pheasant says, many of them are clueless.

The 'whole' Swish network did not go down

Check my BQM.

I had one issue recently where my latency went crazy and a restart of the ONT fixed it but in the 6 mths+ that I have had it it has been 100% uptime for me.

In reply to a post by binary:

I'm similarly curious about what faults and issues may arise over time with FTTP - specifically thinking about the 'local' network rather than the backhaul.

I'd imagine Openreach will keep things working and maintained (more or less), but one can't help but wonder how gracefully some of the altnets will age.

Re copper being problematic - certainly for broadband yes, but I think in its mature final years, the PSTN ended up broadly being pretty good for voice. Hopefully, given that FTTP is built for data from the outset, it should be and hopefully remain pretty reliable.

Fibre itself should last for years, it don't rust or degrade for a start, well in theory it should not degrade, depends on what they used to cover the fibre itself. It should last longer than copper cables, and look how long some of them have been around. the main problem is someone cutting through it. The electronic part can be changed either end as technology gets better.